Seeing and Hearing in the Spring

The gift of poetry is a gift of seeing and hearing the world as if it were discovered for the first time, seeing differently. A lot of my poems are written in “my” persona, an immigrant from Poland, a woman in love… One short example is below – I am a pious Catholic and I love late Gothic art, gold halos on paintings and sculptures of Madonnas.

Seeing Madonnas
at the National Museum, Warsaw

Gothic Madonnas with down-cast eyes
demurely
look within:

The infinity of love
spreads out the galaxies of laughter
amidst nebulae of bliss.

Happy overabundance
marks their cheeks
with a half-smile
of knowing.



Since I can see mountains from my bedroom window, and they look so beautiful all day long with changing colors, shadows, clouds, (not that I spend my days lounging in bed... though with a laptop you can have a "bed-office" as a part of your "home-office"), I find myself writing about the mountains a lot. When I used to fly around the country to conferences and lectures, leaving home at least once per month, my poems were about seeing the world from above the airplane wings, looking down on the Liliputian people below. Here's a poem about the rain season and what happens then:

Canyon Growing Pains

The little baby Canyon said to his Mama
“I want to grow up big, like you!”
She responded: “You have to lose yourself,
Forget your shape, your well-made borders,
Stretch beyond the boundaries
Of decency and rocks.
You have to flow with the flow
Of winter’s blizzards, summer rains.
You have to …” That’s where she was stopped
By violent tremors.

Her child, the Canyon, was no longer little.
A wall of vicious passion roaring down,
He playfully swept old pine-trees off their roots,
Broke windows, covered houses
with thick mud layers, piles on the grass.
He carved a new path from the mountains,
Down to the ancient riverbed, his Grandpa.

What would a teenage Canyon do?
We have no knowledge. Before he grows,
Let’s save our lives and move.

In this poem, I use the "device" of personalization - depicting the canyon stream as a child growing up during the rainy season.

A similar device worked quite well when I envisioned the mountains as ladies getting ready for their earthquake dance by having mud-baths and showers (see my poem, "Mountain Watch" published here earlier). Not that either one is a masterpiece; just an occasional celebration of the spring.

Another place that I cherish in the spring, and actually year-round, is my garden of roses, fruit-trees and a jungle of bushes where many songbirds find shelter.

I spent my childhood in a suburban garden like that in Poland, and liked watching the plants grow, finding the first shoots of green among the dead foliage in March. Birds would come back to sing in late March or April. The winters were too cold for them, filled only with crows and ravens, that flew to Poland from much colder Scandinavia.

The pattern of birdsong in California is different, as many northern songbirds come here for winter or, at least, a portion of it. We have a burst of birdsong in October. Have yo noticed? March is filled with a symphony of voices.

Bird’s News

The bird in my yard
eloquently said

“The Spring has come!
The Spring has come!
Completely, secretly
WILL STAYYYYYYYY!!!
Oooh, yes, yes, yes, yes,
Come and hear,
come and hear,
come and seeeee!”

Indeed,
when I went out,
the Spring was there,
smiling
___________________________________


In February I went to hear the poetry of my friend, actress, poet and photographer, Elena Secota, who was a featured poet at Beyond Baroque, www.elenasecota.com

Recited with a lovely voice and in a slight Romanian accent, accompanied by a guitar of her friend, Chad, her poetry took us to her favorite place in the world, the beach, where she escaped to watch the waves of the ocean in solitude. She wrote a whole book of poems about the ocean and illustrated it with her photographs, some taken repeatedly from the same place at 6:30 a.m. That’s dedication!

The book is written in one poetic persona, “her” persona – imagined to an extent, since she is the most social of my friends, always forging and strengthening friendships, bringing people together. Yet, she praises solitude…


_____________________________________


Photographs of leaves (c) 2010 by Maja Trochimczyk.

Portrait of Elena Secota, courtesy of Elena Secota.

Gothic Madonna: Tilman Riemenschneider (German, c. 1460-1531), Madonna and Child, carved linden wood. Wikipedia.

Love After Love - For Valentine's Day

It is a topic of so many country songs, so many romantic sonnets, so many tales and novels. It gave rise to new genres of literature (romance, troubadour poetry) and in other arts (rom com, or romantic comedy in film; the comedy as a classic theatrical genre). After centuries of efforts to describe it, we still do not know what it is. The taxonomies and definitions that I cited in the previous essay are just one way of approaching this elusive topic.

For the Valentine's Day of 2006, I wrote the following short poem, dedicated to my children. It is simple and didactic, defining different types or levels of loving:

Love Defined

Amor
You are beautiful. I love you.

Eros
You are beautiful. I want you. I take you.

Caritas
You are beautiful. I love you. I give you. . .

Agape
Beauty is Goodness is Truth is Love.
Or,
We are.

♥ ♥ ♥


Step by step, the gradation leads upward from romantic infatuation to spiritual Love. At the highest level it is a complete acceptance of Being, the eternal "Amen" - "Yes" resounding from the slopes of the mountains, from the waves of oceans, from the smallest blade of grass and crystal of quartz in the sand. Love is... and always will be, unchanged. To understand it, it is enough to think of its opposite - hatred - and the deafening, blinding "No" that it entails. Denial. Rejection. Death.

The variants of love that I named "Amor" and "Eros" are often intertwined. The presence of "Caritas" and "Agape" may be sensed even in those stages of admiration and attraction. The following poems are selected to illustrate the process of spiritual evolution from love based in need, want and desire to that grounded in compassion and connection through mutual acceptance - the divinely timeless love.

A Chocolate Kiss

You are my chocolate,
my candy, my lover sweet
in the morning,
alive with kisses

My soul rests
like a bird
on your shoulder

I dream of you
daily


♥ ♥ ♥



This free-verse poem has been my favorite among my own love poems, not only because I do love chocolate. It is just sweet. Love for another human being that brings a sense of safety, trust, happiness in being together, in sharing, in becoming one... And then, there is the longing, dreams filled with desire. That is one way of looking at love: the romantic, "Happy Valentine's Day" type of love.

Its strength, from the times of Sappho, has astounded generations of poets, who, like Goethe's Werther wandered around smitten, with the eyes of their beloved blazing in their mind, the feeling of her lips still burning in memory... Petrarch, Dante, Rossetti, Rilke... all lovers of love. How strong could it be? For Sappho, it was like the storm that fells trees, like a lightning. Here's my version of that sentiment:

Lauda

It waxes and wanes
with the moon

It grows and recedes with the tides
flowing through my veins
with every heartbeat

It shines in the dark
like phosphorescent letters
on a child’s shirt

It is so full of color
that it shames the rainbow
and dims the neon glare
of acrylic wonderland

Indestructible
it has outgrown my despair
my anguish, my pride

Like child’s laughter
in an empty room,
like the stillness
of crystal mountain air

Beyond words
love is

♥ ♥ ♥

Now, if love cannot be defined in words, what am I doing, trying to name it and describe it in so many different ways? That, of course, is the task of poetry: naming the unnameable. In doing so, poets have linked love to roses, rich and fragrant, with hues ranging from pure white, through rosy, to intense scarlet and vermillion. Reading the history of roses makes you realize that, although these flowers were found in nature, they were created and re-created in countless varieties by lovers for lovers. The rose gardeners and makers crossed different varieties, spliced the roots of one bush with the branches of another - all in pursuit of that perfect flower. Now, let someone who saw a rose deny the power of evolution, or the human role in evolution...


A Secret

I thought roses.
I thought rich, velvet blossoms.
I thought a red rainbow
from deep crimson to delicately pinkish.

The secret was underground
where the roots sustain
the multi-hued orgy of sensuous allure –
flowers opening to dazzle and fade.

The strength of the rose
is invisible – you see the blush
of seduction in each leaf and petal,

You admire their charms.
Yet, you care for what’s out of sight,
not for the obvious.

I thought your love.
I thought how you adore me.
I went deeper down to the source.

The rose, Sappho’s lightning
of beauty, breathes love,
laughs at the wind, wonders.

The mystic rosebush dances,
crowned with the royal
garland of fire.

♥ ♥ ♥

In this garland of allusions, I managed to weave Sappho with T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets (the end of Little Gidding):

"All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one."

I also thought about Rilke's superb ode to the beauty of roses (Les Roses, translated by Barbara Collignon, VI and XV). Elsewhere he compared these flowers to eyes of butterflies, transient and timeless at the same time:

"One rose alone is all roses
and this one: irreplaceable,
perfect..."

And then, he says:

"Alone, oh abundant flower
you create your own space"

One rose alone ... That is a great idea I borrowed for my next rose/love poem. The "Rose Window" is structured like an argument, in a Socratic style of thesis, refutation, and synthesis. It marries the timelessness of a stained-glass window in a medieval cathedral with the recurring timelessness of petals that grow and fall, grow and fall, ever new, ever old, ever new...



Rose Window

I place you in the heart
of my rose, dark red one,
with dew drops on its leaves.

Like a tricked-up baby
from Ann Geddes’ postcard
you rest, snugly wrapped
in the comfort of my love.

“That too shall pass,” they say,
“That too shall pass.
The rose will wither,
love will fade away.”

Respectfully, I disagree.
I know the symmetry
of velvet petals
is but an opening
into a different universe,
a cosmic window,
timeless.

I see it in the shyness
of your smile. Yes.
You are that lucky.

In the morning,
when the curtains of mist
open above silver hills
carved from time
like a Japanese woodcut,
you taste freedom.

You found your true self
under the detritus
of disordered life.

Isn’t it strange
that you’ve been saved
by the perfection
of just one rose?

♥ ♥ ♥

Too sweet? Too charming? Let me go all the way, then, through a rainbow of hues found in a painting I liked so much that I actually bought. At one of the Poets on Site's Manzanar Workshop projects, I saw a watercolor by Minoru Ikeda, "With You Always." The title reminded me of a Patsy Cline song, and the colors of the hues remembered from the landscape of my childhood spent in villages of my grandparents, and in the pink house surrounded by yellow daisies that towered above my head when I came back to the city suburbs from my summer vacations.

My friend and wonderful poet, Susan Rogers, wrote a poem for her mother, inspired by the same painting, so I'm including my poem here as a gift of friendship. In poetry "I am, you are, we are."



Always

The voice of Patsy Cline
hovers above sweet cuteness of pastels,
brightly hued like the candy
we call “landrynki” and laugh
when the sugar dye paints our tongues
with fake pink and blue, fuchsia and lavender

We walk down a country road
to our pink and blue homes,
in a fuchsia and lavender embrace
under matching, happy hills that sing
“I’ll be loving you, always
With the love that’s true, always”

♥ ♥ ♥

Let us hear the timeless song, then... Irving Berlin's ballad, "Always" - in the voice of Patsy Cline who died too early, leaving us with the unforgettable sounds of her rich, throaty mezzosoprano, country-style, no less: Patsy Cline sings Always.

________________________________________


With the exception of "Defining Love," the poems reproduced here were published earlier, in Rose Always (2011, now withdrawn). "Rose Window" was published in Voice of the Village in the Voice of the Village 1, no. 10, August 2010, p. 27 (pdf download).

"Always" appeared in a chapbook by Poets on Site edited by Kathabela Wilson and including poems written for the 12th Annual Fukuhara Workshop at Manzanar and Alabama Hills, Observations and Interpretations, (Poets on Site, September 2009). The poem was first read at the closing of the exhibition from the Workshop held at APC gallery in Torrance in September 2009.


 

What is love? Valentine's Day Reflections

What is love? Expressions like “Mmmm, I love this chocolate…” or “Wow, I love this dress!” somehow do not seem to belong with “Whoever fails to love does not know God, because God is love.” (First Letter of St. John, 4: 8). The month of February is a good time for considering this question since it is dedicated to the celebration of love and romance, with the ubiquitous red hearts, sweets, diamonds, and Victoria Secret’s underwear ads. Apparently, it is also a time for desperate searching for a mate, with the accompanying spike in the use of dating sites and the inevitable incidents of depression.

I know at least one lovely and love-filled couple who celebrates their engagement on Valentine’s Day, and why not? I imagine that such perfectly match paired human beings are like the mystical angelic creatures dwelling in Swedish theologian Emmanuel Swedenborg’s Heaven – eight-limbed, perfectly whole, united for eternity… Swedenborg writes: “The most perfect and noblest human form is that which exists when by marriage two forms become one single form, thus when two fleshes become one flesh in accordance with creation. That the mind of the man is then elevated into superior light, and the mind of the wife into superior heat; and that they then bud and blossom and bear fruit, as do trees in the time of spring.” (From Swedenborg’s Wisdom's Delight in Marriage Love, 201: XVI).

In Swedenborg’s perfect “conjugal union” the male element is wisdom and the female is love. By uniting and exchanging these core elements, the man and woman become whole and perfect. Only together they are completely fulfilled. This vision of coupled happiness inspired the following poem:


Eros 6

we are the walnut
of perennial wisdom

locked together
(two halves in one)
we share one breath
of blessed air

delighted,
we peel the minutes
off the ancient clock



The loving couple defines their own world that they share and that they exclude everyone else from. In their uniquely intimate love, the sexual and the emotional are fully united. Their bond is deep and deepens with time. Eventually, it may seem to be timeless – we hear about couples celebrating their 30th, 40th, or 50th wedding anniversaries and still in love… They are on their way to become Swedenborg’s angelic creatures in married heaven.

For the rest of fallible humans, there are repeated try-and-fail attempts, serial dating, serial marrying, serial heartbreaks. The fairy-tale romances start from love at first sight and continue in the novelty and excitement of meeting the beloved, discovering new things about him or her, knowing them and knowing oneself through them. Poets write about that love, film-makers keep producing romantic comedies filled with surprise romances, ending these made-up stories, for the edification of the masses, at their high points of romantic fulfillment. Dante and his Beatrice? Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet? Goethe’s Werther and his beloved?

Amor 2
You looked at me
and I saw myself
for the first time

I’m beautiful! I’ve heard this
many times before
but did not quite believe

In your hands
love fills
every square inch of my skin

I glow with a brightness
that even your absence
cannot dim


The contentment with having found a perfect, loving partner, too soon and too often gives in to the longing for more, always more – to see the beloved all the time, to glow with the delight of his or her presence, doing the most mundane, silly, every-day things… Does such “love-at-first-sight” exist?

Dr. Earl Nauman in Love at First Sight: The Stories and Science Behind Instant Attraction (Casablanca Press, 2001) claims that it does, and cites a whole series of first-person narrative accounts of its sudden appearance and life-long persistence. The “love-at-first-sight” tradition extends to ancient literature of Greece and Rome, to the story of Narcissus, an innocent youth of such incredible beauty and ignorance that he fell in love with his own reflection in smooth surface of the water and stayed there, transformed into a flower, abandoned to eternal self-contemplation… The psychological disorder of “narcissism” comes from that story. Is all “love-at-first-sight” and its core of desire essentially selfish? Why the success of so many romances in novels, theater, film?

Desire, the heart of erotic love may be understood and explained as a profound sense of emptiness, of needing and wanting someone to be together with, to “have and hold” – as the British marriage vows have it. That longing, in turn, too often leads to disenchantment: when satisfied it may be transformed into boredom, when the satisfaction is postponed, it may lead to disappointment. The heightened expectations are a set-up for failure. And so the cycle continues.

Eros 1

my dreams are simple –
I just want you

today, tomorrow,
in my bed, at my table,
talking on your cell phone,
putting on your socks,
all wet from the shower,
bewildered by the steady
glow of my love,
touched so deeply
that it hurts –

you – just one man
of wicked charm,
strength, wisdom

A friend of mine with a rich romantic history told me of a horrifying moment of self-revelation. While seating in a car with her lover number three, she looked at his hand, that he wrapped around hers in the exactly same gesture as her lover number one used to do. Déjà vu ... She felt the same love, the same elation, perfect happiness of togetherness with both men, yet, they were so different. Was it not the love of that person, then? The love of who they really were? Was it just a sweetly seductive feeling that being near and with these men engendered in her? Did she actually care about them and their dreams or did she just need them to put herself in a dream state of being filled with the ecstatic joy of love? Was it the heightened emotion of being in danger, of flirting and breaking rules that she misread for love?

Amor 6

the more I love
the more dangerous
life becomes
in its graphic beauty
carved with a dagger
stolen from time

the blade cuts
old wounds open

it slides on the skin
of the moment

pierced by knowing


I could end here, by adding a comment from a love-researcher, Stanton Peel who analyzed the phenomenon from a critical perspective in “Fools for Love: The Romantic Ideal, Psychological Theory and Addictive Love.” Peel contrasts “addictive” love filled with pain, “uncontrollable urge and unconscious motivation” with love as a “state of heightened awareness and responsibility.... one that kindles the most elements of feeling and moral awakening.”

In a similar vein, Robert J. Sternberg, one of the editors of The Psychology of Love where Peel’s article was published (Yale University Press, 1988), came up with a triangular theory of love (passion + intimacy + decision/commitment), and a multi-tiered classification of types of love that result from presence and absence of some of these elements. Between the extremes of passion (infatuation) and intimacy (liking), dwells the romantic love. Between passion and commitment you can find “fatuous love” but commitment alone is “empty love” – is it love at all? Just deciding to be with someone without either being attracted to that person, or liking him or her? If you add “liking” – the resultant “companionate love” is what most marriages turn into after 10 years, if not ending in a divorce. Only when the three elements co-exist, Sternberg claims, love becomes perfect “consummate love.”

Are there any other kinds? Let me continue next week...

______________________________

All poems cited from Maja Trochimczyk, Miriam's Iris: Or Angels in the Garden (Moonrise Press, 2008).

New Year, New Moon, New Light

Let us talk about the moon, then... In the month of February, the Village Poets of Sunland-Tujunga will present a wonderful, witty and erudite poet, Mari Werner (February 27, 2011, at 4:30 p.m., Bolton Hall Museum, 10110 Commerce Avenue, Tujunga, CA 91042). For her "portrait" on the series's blog, she sent in the following poem, which is so delightful, I decided to reproduce it here as well:

Crescent Moon

by Mari Werner

A crescent moon floats above the horizon.
“You can totally see the rest of it,”
she says, as though the moon is cheating.

And the moon is cheating.
A crescent moon should be
what a crescent moon looks like
in a bedtime story illustration,
a crescent clear and simple,
no dark sphere to detract
from its perfection.

Under the smile of the crescent moon,
she sleeps in fluffy comforters,
winked upon by stars
cuddled by a curled up cat,
guarded by a sleeping dog.

That’s the bedtime story version,
but here on the surface of the planet...
you can totally see the rest of it.

In Polish children's literature, the moon is often presented as a "crescent roll" - "rogalik" - brown, well baked and tasty, neither an alien, eerie source of lunar light, casting a pall on all living things (a la "Pierrot lunaire"), nor a wasteland of rocks and dust that the astronauts have walked on. Not really a place for lunatics, either... A tamed, story-book, crescent.

On New Year's Eve 2010, over a year ago, I saw the moon differently: full, enormous, with a fuzzy halo taking over half the sky. At midnight, it crowned the horizon with its lucid glory. I saw its bluish reflections in water droplets on my rose.
________________________________________

MIDNIGHT ROSE

"...quanta è la larghezza di questa rosa ne l’estreme foglie!" ~ Dante, Paradiso, Canto XXX

A pale light appeared behind the black ridge of the mountains. The moon floated up like a white balloon losing air, whitening the night around it. The bright halo cooled the glare of electric snowflakes on a Christmas fence, sheltering the reindeer of prickly light points and wire. The moon rose higher, the halo around it grew into a solid crown. It took over half the sky, sparkled in water droplets on the rose. Straight above our heads at midnight, it was a brilliant omen for the New Year.

the moon’s new halo
dims electric glare into calm -
illumination
________________________________________

As the night wore on, the intense whiteness of the moon at midnight reflected the brightness of my rose-shaped diamond brooch that could have been a heirloom, but was not. I make up my own history here, in the land of endless possibilities, so I have amassed a whole bunch of such "could have been" heirlooms. For instance, I bought my Canadian Grandma on E-bay - a portrait of her, at least. It is a gold-framed late 19th-century daguerrotype of a stern dark-haired lady with hands folded in her lap. Elegant, strong, and confident, with a lovely cameo brooch at her neck, small lace collar, and a wide skirt of a shiny brown tafetta dress - she looks like she could have been my ancestor. I'll adopt her, I thought, and clicked "buy now."

I did not buy the brooch, though, it came from my daughter's prom dress, worn once and discarded after one glorious night. I find its shiny petals a notable addition to my festive wardrobe. Like a magpie, I admire all things shiny; since I lost that platinum bracelet of real diamonds worth a couple thousand of dollars, a gift from my parents, I prefer to dazzle without the expense. I do not think any jewelrer would have loaned me those priceless gems for the Oscars. Here it is, a diamond rose sparkling in my haibun for the full moon.
________________________________________

MIDNIGHT FIRE

"In the golden holiness of a night that will never be seen again and will never return…" ~ from a Gypsy tale

After greeting the New Year with a Chopin polonaise danced around the hall, I drove down the street of your childhood. It was drenched with the glare of the full moon in a magnificent sparkling halo. The old house was not empty and dark. On the front lawn, boys were jumping around a huge bonfire. They screamed with joy, as the flames shot up to the sky. The gold reached out to the icy blue light, when they called me to join their wild party. Sparks scattered among the stars. You were there, hidden in shadows. I sensed your sudden delight.

my rose diamond brooch
sparkles on the black velvet -
stars at midnight
_______________________________________

Growing up Polish, becoming American

At a recent annual meeting of the Polish American Historical Society in Boston, I was invited to join a panel of poets reading verse about their experience of "growing up Polish-American." I did not, I grew up Polish... or maybe not even that... In my remarks, I talked about my immigrant experience and about my grandparents and family history affected by the war. I was born and raised in Warsaw, but I trace my roots to eastern borderlands of Poland.

My compatriot, Czeslaw Milosz, whose footsteps I followed from the Polish Kresy, north-eastern Borderlands, to the Far West of California, often wrote about the spiritual richness arising from the clash of cultures in areas where Poles, Belorussians, Lithuanians, Jews, and “Tutejsi” – people from here, have lived for centuries. After the conquerors of America returned home with some new root vegetables and the new plantings spread around Europe, they shared a cuisine, eating not only the local blincy, bliny, nalesniki, or pancakes, but also placki kartoflane, or latkes…

Many languages, many religions: Catholicism, Orthodoxy, Judaism, even Islam, represented by the Tatar settlement of Kruszyniany, established in the 17th century by a Muslim captain of cavalry Samuel Murza Krzeczkowski, his soldiers and some other Tatar officers were granted land there by the Polish king. My grandmother’s village of Bielewicze is not far from there, and not far from the ancient old-growth forests, the "puszcza" of Bialowiez. Her name was Nina Niegierysz. Her father, my great grandfather came from somewhere in Ukraine, and bought a large estate in Mieleszki, in the Voivodeship of Bialystok. I have a picture of my great grandfather as a boy in Odessa. Who were these people? Memories are lost in the turmoil of history. Even the birth certificate of my father was burnt during the war.

Thanks to this part of my family, I’m not even fully Polish. My grandmother married a "local" man, Wincenty Trochimczyk, and this is how I got my Belorussian last name. She did not speak or write Polish; having dropped out of high school to work on the family farm, she wrote in Russian alphabet and spoke to her Polish grandchildren in Belorussian. My father, Aleksy, started learning Polish at six, and spoke with the Eastern borderlander accent, pronouncing the consonant H differently from CH.

My mother Henryka Wajszczuk was born in Baranowicze, in Nowogrodek Voivodeship (now Belarus, previously Soviet Union, but Poland before the war), and her family belonged to impoverished Polish landed gentry. An online family tree is maintained by an American cousin, Waldemar Wajszczuk. The family roots go back to the 16th century and there are many branches spread out across the world.

The extended family includes such memorable characters as my mother's uncle Dominik Hordziejewski, who used to ride in a horse buggy across his vast estate to the famous lake of Switez or to Nowogrodek church, but who lost his mind after the Soviets took over and forcibly resettled him and his family to Gdansk Oliva. They had 24 hours to pack the remnants of their possessions in less than half of a railroad car. Try squeezing a manor house into that! Of his herds, he was left with one cow. He spent his last years dressed in his best coat and top hat, grazing this one cow in the parks and by the roads of his new city. Before the war, he had shepherds doing that on his estate...

My Polish grandmother Maria Wasiuk gave me my first name, which I changed to my childhood nickname of Maja only in California, after a decade of being annoyed by being called Ma-ri-a, like the heroine of the West Side Story, an alien name for a stranger... My parents met after the war, while studying and helping rebuilt the destroyed Warsaw.

Thus, I am a hybrid, urban and rural, sophisticated and simple. I am primarily a highly sophisticated and educated city-dweller. I spent 10 out of every 12 months in the capital of Poland, Warsaw, studying music, literature, and history, attending theater and opera premieres, art openings, and exclusive receptions. Looking back, I would call myself a "fashionista" or a "social butterfly" in high heels and fancy dresses. But for the two months of the summer I was transformed into a country girl working in the fields, picking mushrooms and berries in the forest, making hay, carrying water from the well, or cooking strawberry preserves on a wood stove. For some reason, when remembering my childhood, those summer days glow with happiness never experienced in the most sophisticated environments of rainy Warsaw.

The loss of the native land, vividly experienced by all emigrants, is a frequent theme of my poetry, often juxtaposing the old with the new. Here's a poem inspired by my childhood in the meadows of Bielewicze, an idyllic land, remembered during a walk in the Big Tujunga Wash...

Dragonfly Days

The California dragonflies are
as they should be – orange,
enormous, flying in formation
above green algae blooming
in the winter stream.

A hairy bug looks for a crevice
to hide his ugliness,
straight from the pages
of a horror book or a painting
by Hieronymus Bosch –
a creature that could have been,
but is not.

A blue heron floats down.
His majestic wings beat slowly
until he finds a reedy alcove
for an al fresco dinner. Transfixed,
I watch his shape-shifting ways –
a cruel flash of movement erupting
from a graceful silhouette
standing still as a priceless etching
amidst the rocks.

Once, I knew such dark-winged herons
watching us scare away the fish
from their river with our childish giggles.
Red-billed storks picked their lunch
of frogs and crickets from the trail
of freshly cut grass, its straight rows
measured by the motion
of my uncle’s scythe
across the meadow.

Like long-legged pets,
storks followed the man
who fed them. They paid no notice
to a silent child trying to catch
a butterfly in her small hands,
watching bright blue dragonflies
over a ditch filled with rainwater
and forget-me-nots.

Blue and orange, the dragonflies
still haunt my memories, hovering
above the smooth surface
of long forgotten stream,
beneath the tranquil expanse
of high noon sky.
 
The key word is “once” – the pastime is one of comparison: then and now, there and here, what was and will not ever be and what is and will continue to be with a full weight of the presence. This poem was included in my first book of poetry, Miriam's Iris, or Angels in the Garden (2008).

The sense of loss and distance is also making an appearance in the poem about birch trees, my favorite of all. There were birch trees near my grandparents houses in both Bielewicze and Trzebieszow. My parents planted them, with oaks, in their country garden on the outskirts of Warsaw. Inspired by a painting by Steven West depicting the aspen, the poem includes a paraphrase of a title of a book on Russian “bieriozka” letters written on birch bark in old Russian villages. I got the book from my father, Aleksy, who had worked as Russian translator and electrical engineer and spent over 20 years in Persian Gulf, Iraq and the Emirates.


A White Letter

The aspens look at me. The eyes of white birch
reproach: "Where are you, why are you there?
Not here, with us?" Yes, I was supposed to keep
collecting yellow leaves each fall.
The branches sang softly, trembled
in the slightest breeze, anxious to fly away.
Birches shed their bark in broad strips and sheets
I could use to write love letters and stories
of olden times, but did not, seduced
by the allure of paper and keyboard –
the tools of memory that keeps the eyes
of the birch trees wide open as they whisper
I will send you a birch bark letter -
“я тебе берёзку пошлю…”*


The poem was written for an exhibition of paintings at APC Gallery in Torrance, and published in a chapbook by Poets on Site of Pasadena. Perhaps poetry can only grow "on site" - somewhere it takes root?

When looking for a place of my own in California, I picked Sunland - with its village atmosphere and friendly neighbors it reminded me of those villages of my childhood where everyone knew whose granddaughter I was... The beauty of Sunland's landscape - our gardens and mountains, the colors, the sunlight - does not cease to astound me. It feels all the more vivid right after coming back from wintry, snowy, beautiful, historical but ultimately quite grey Boston.

__________________________________________________________

Photos of Sunland and Big Tujunga Wash by Maja Trochimczyk

Happy New Year 2011!

Among hundreds of wishes in my inbox this year (Christmas, Holiday, Birthday and New Year's Wishes), I found some fantastic animated ones, and the following one in Serbian from Mira Mataric, a wonderful Serbian-American poet:

Živeli zdravo, radosno, radoznalo, raskošno, razumno i razborito, povremeno se okliznite u avanturu i ne zažalite za onim što odlazi!

I do not know exactly what it means, but it certainly looks good! I also liked very much the wishes from two Polish friends, "Happy New Year Everybody" from Krysia Kaszubowska and "Happy New Year" from Eva Matysek Mazur. It seems that paper cards have been replaced with lovely animated ones these days, just as books are slowly giving way to electronic "reads" on things like I-Pads, Kimbles and other electronic book readers. I like cleaning the frost flowers off the electronic window to see the village covered in snow outside - just like the villages and the frozen flowers of my Polish childhood. But I like electronic snow much more than the real one, and that's why I live in Southern California...



At a recent Haiku Party of the Southern California Haiku Study Group, chaired by Debbie Kolodji at the welcoming home of Wendy and Tom Garen, I read two new haiku celebrating the change of the year, from the tumultuous Year of the Tiger to the placid Year of the Rabbit. These are my first poems of the year, expressing the hope for a serene and content future, or, at least, some rest. The first one got accidentally printed on four lines. The white rabbit is the one from Monty Python, of course. Enjoy!

Happy New Year! Dosiego Roku!

Christmas and New Year's Wishes

For the holiday season, I was asked to write something "Christmasy" for the party of Little Landers Historical Society at Bolton Hall in Tujunga. I thought that a recent poem for a married couple celebrating their 35th wedding anniversary would fit it quite well, if there was a carol in the text. I chose to quote a carol that remains one of the most beloved Polish carols, cited by Fryderyk Chopin in his Scherzo in B-minor, op. 20.


Married Christmas

May your path be smooth,
and your sunlight mellow
~ an old blessing

He said
“You are the apple of my eye”
She said
“Let us have tea for two”

Steam rises from bronze liquid
freshly-baked szarlotka waits its turn
scent of cinnamon sweetens the air
the music box plays an ancient carol

Lulajze, Jezuniu, moja perelko,
Lulaj ulubione me piescidelko

She does not have to finish –
one glance and he knows
after thirty-five years together
faithful like cranes on a Chinese etching

Their looking glass is hidden away
in a box of treasures they don’t need
to find blessings
among daily crumbs of affection


The carol's text incipit means: “Hush, hush, Baby Jesus, my little pearl, my lovely little darling…” – This ancient Polish carol is a simple lullaby, filled with tender love for the infant, held in the arms of his gentle mother. There are many lullabies among Polish carols; the focus of Polish Christmas is on the baby and his mother, on the familial love that binds them. The Lulajże Jezuniu carol is sung throughout the Christmas holiday season, from Christmas Eve to February 2nd, the Candlemas.

Last year, I was traveling close to Christmas, and the empty airports were full of fake cheer, recorded Christmas carols blaring from the loudspeakers and tinsel with childish decorations everywhere. The poem I wrote about that is similar in tone to the "Married Christmas" - extolling the virtue of the subtle affection, gentle understanding of a shared life, the true family virtue...



Rules for Happy Holy Days

Don’t play Christmas carols
at the airport. Amidst the roar
of jet engines, they will spread
a blanket of loneliness
over the weary, huddled masses,
trying not to cry out for home.

Don’t put Christmas light on a poplar.
With branches swathed in white
galaxies, under yellow leaves, the tree
will become foreign, like the skeleton
of an electric fish, deep in the ocean.

Clean the windows from the ashes
of last year’s fires. Glue the wings
of a torn paper angel. Brighten
your home with the fresh scent
of pine needles and rosemary.

Take a break from chopping almonds
to brush the cheek of your beloved
with the back of your hand,
just once, gently. Smile and say:
“You look so nice, dear,
you look so nice.”


This is the poetry of a moment in the kitchen, home cooking meals of the season and sharing a togetherness and affection that is quite beyond words, yet forms the very fabric of life.

Best wishes to all my poets friends!